


love is not a victory march (it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah)

by preciouseternity



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 14:45:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6199114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preciouseternity/pseuds/preciouseternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not about evidence. It’s not even about myth versus reality. It’s about the fear that’s sitting deep in her stomach. The uncertainty that’s keeping her from accepting what might otherwise be a blessing. Last night, when she went to him, she’d wanted a distraction not a soul mate. In a world like this, a soul mate is a curse. It’s like begging for tragedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love is not a victory march (it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where to even place this. Let's say it's divergent from early season 1 and call it good. I wrote this in response to a post on tumblr. At the time, I thought it was a fabulous idea, but it turned out way differently than I wanted and I'm tired of looking at it so here, my friends, it's time to suffer.

It happens like this:

The grounders attack, leaving five dead and nearly twenty injured. Clarke spends hours in her makeshift infirmary, doing all she can with what little she has. She tells herself she can save everyone, that no one is going to die tonight, but it turns out to be a lie. And it kills her. 

Every bone in her body is tired. Every inch of her longs for oblivion. Every moment on Earth has been a battle, and she just wants to sleep. But this isn’t about her or her selfish wants. It’s about those injured and bleeding, the ones who made a sacrifice to protect their people. It’s all Clarke can do to keep them alive. 

The dead are covered and buried quickly. The survivors are stabilized and carefully watched by volunteers who are instructed to retrieve Clarke if any of the injured begin to show signs of deterioration. Clarke steps out of the infirmary into the cool night air, knowing that, in all likelihood, she’ll be back here in a couple hours. 

Several fires are burning around camp. A week ago, Clarke would have demanded those fires be extinguished, but the grounders already know they’re here. It’s no use. They’re sitting ducks, too disorganized and tired and scared to move.

Clarke washes her bloody hands in a basin of air-temperature water, but no matter how hard she scrubs, her hands are tinted crimson. She should have done more. She should have saved them. Nothing should be this way in the first place. Anger rises in her, but is quickly extinguished by her bone-deep exhaustion. 

Her eyes scan the camp. Finn, Raven, Wells, and Monty sit around the main fire looing tired and sad. They don’t speak, they just sit, looking as if the entire world is resting on their shoulders. She knows how they feel. 

She looks toward the wall. It’s meant to keep them safe, but sometimes it just made her feel trapped. Besides, as they learned the day before, it’s not effective if the grounders can lure them out so easy. 

“You okay?” 

Clarke sighs are the voice that comes from behind her. Relief floods her body, but she’s unwilling to show it. She’s unwilling to show most of her emotions these days, so she turns around and tilts her head to the side. His face is bruised and cut from the battle the day before, but he’d been lucky to make it out with minor injuries. Clarke had wanted to treat his wounds with the antibacterial solution she and Monty had made, but he’d refused. She thinks she’ll have to revisit that argument as she looks now at how the cut he’d gotten when he’d been sliced across the shoulder with one of the grounder’s blades is reddened around the edges – a sign of infection. He hadn’t shown any signs of poisoning thus far, so Clarke is confident that that particular blade had been bare. Thankfully. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be on patrol?” she asks lightly. She’s self aware enough to admit she doesn’t want him out there, but she also knows that it’s a necessity. Not everyone is as capable with a gun as him. 

“Miller took over,” says Bellamy, distracted by that cut on his arm. His fingers itch at it, disturbing a part of the scab. “Damn thing,” he mutters as blood begins to drip down his arm. 

Clarke takes a step forward and swats his hand away. “Stop touching it,” she scolds, pressing her fingers to the skin around the wound and finding that it’s warm. “Do you want me to take a look?” 

“I’d say no if I thought that was actually a question,” he replies with a smirk. 

“I don’t know why you took the bandage off,” she says as she leads him into the infirmary. She makes eye contact with Harper who is sitting over her injured friend with concern obvious on her face. Clarke knows the feeling of helplessness. “Sit,” Clarke instructs Bellamy as she goes to the cabinet that holds all of the medicinal concoctions produced by Monty. 

“I couldn’t move my damn shoulder,” Bellamy replies to her question about the bandage. 

Clarke rolls her eyes and then catches him itching at it again. “Stop touching it,” she snaps. “You’re infecting it.” 

A smirk finds its way onto his tired face. “I’ll live, Princess.” 

“Maybe not,” she tells him fiercely, their eyes meeting for just a moment too long. Clarke shakes it off, running her hand through her hair. “Take off your shirt – and hush,” she adds before he can make a comment typical of himself.

He strips off his t-shirt with a wince, revealing the rest of his cut that spans from mid bicep to the top of his shoulder as well as the bruises that cover portions of his torso and chest. Clarke takes a moment to appreciate that his wounds aren’t worse. After all, he’d been the first to intercept the attackers. 

Clarke dips her bare finger in the small jar of antibacterial cream and smears it gently over his wound. She knows it stings, but he doesn’t betray that fact save a small twitch of his muscle. She works carefully so not the disturb the barely scabbed over skin. The wound is fairly deep, and it must be painful, but his expression remains stoic. 

“I don’t think you should be going out on patrols,” Clarke says as she puts antibiotic cream over the antibacterial, and wraps a new bandage around his shoulder. “At least not until you have full range of motion back.” 

Bellamy raises an eyebrow. “Worried about me?” 

“Usually,” she admits.

She stands, grabs the medications, and puts them away. When she returns to Bellamy, he’s struggling to get his bad arm through the sleeve of his t-shirt. He’s so damn stubborn that Clarke isn’t sure what’s going to happen as she reaches out to help him, but he lets her do it without fight. 

They lapse into comfortable silence as Clarke looks down at him, her fingers absentmindedly stroking through his thick curls. She thinks back to mere weeks earlier when she couldn’t stand him. When she thought that he’d be the demise of them all. How they’d fought and yelled and divided the camp. 

She can’t even place an exact moment where she’d started to trust him. It just happened gradually, with every passing day. He’d proved over and over that he wasn’t the monster he liked to think he was. He genuinely cares about all of them, and she genuinely cares about him – and not just in a “I need you to help me lead” kind of way. An “I need you” kind of way. 

They’d been dancing around each other for weeks. Getting close, and then getting scared and snapping away. It’s become a pattern so much so that Clarke’s not sure anything’s ever going to come of it. Maybe that’s a good thing. It would just complicate an already amazingly complicated situation. 

Bellamy pushes the hair away from her forehead, his thumb ghosting over the wound that sat right on her hairline. She’d been hit in the head hard with a club, but that was pretty much the extent of her injuries. 

“It’s fine. It’s nothing,” she says, pulling away from him and making her way toward the exit. Before she leaves, she turns back. “Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you more of the antibiotic. And no patrolling.” 

She doesn’t make it ten steps before he catches up with her, his hand catching her at the crook of her elbow and spinning her around. “You feel guilty,” he observes. 

Clarke lets a long breath out through her nose. She notices Finn – now alone by the fire - staring at them intently, but ignores it. “I couldn’t save them,” she whispers, her eyes looking in the direction of where they bury their dead. 

“You can’t save everyone,” he tells her, hooking his finger gently at her jaw to guide her gaze back to him. “It’s not your fault.” 

Clarke sees Finn stand up and huff over to his tent dramatically. Once upon a time, she would have cared how this scene with Bellamy looked, but not anymore. Half the camp already had wagers set up for when they’d finally kiss. It’s pointless to try to hide the connection she has with him, and she’s tired of fighting it. 

“Bellamy?” she asks after a moment. 

“Hmm?” 

“Do you think it’s possible that this is all a dream? That we’re actually still on the ark? Or it’s all a hallucination brought on by radiation poisoning?” 

A tiny smile hints at the corners of his mouth. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” 

“Well,” Clarke concedes. “Maybe not the radiation poisoning one.” 

“Maybe not,” he agrees, looking at her with intensity. “We’re going to get through this,” he says after a moment. “We’ll survive it.” 

“Will we?” Clarke asks mostly rhetorically. 

Bellamy pushes a strand of hair out of her face and then spreads his hand to cradle the side of her head. “I will do everything I can to keep you safe,” he says fiercely, pausing when he realizes his mistake. “To keep us safe.” 

Clarke breathes a short laugh. “You can barely keep yourself safe,” she jokes, and then gets serious. “But I trust you.” 

It’s then that Bellamy decides to kiss her. Clarke folds into him, finally feeling safe for the first time since they landed. They kiss as if they need each other to breathe, and maybe they do. It’s so intense and cathartic that Clarke almost forgets where she is. 

Almost. 

“Clarke!” cries Harper from the entrance to the infirmary. The sound tears Clarke from Bellamy, both of them completely breathless. “I need you in here.”

Bellamy offers her a small smile and then turns toward his tent. Clarke runs in after Harper, her heart threatening to beat through her chest. 

An hour after Clarke began working on him, Harper’s friend dies. Clarke wants to cry as she pulls the sheet over his whitened face, but she manages to hold it together for Harper who stands beside her in complete shock. 

Six dead. 

When they’d landed, there had been a hundred of them, now only seventy-nine remain. She’s failing. As their leader. As their doctor. In every way that’s possible, she’s failing them. 

Clarke tells Harper that they’ll bury him in the morning and leaves as quickly as possible. If she stays in there a moment longer, she knows she’ll break. The all too familiar feeling of guilt pulses through her veins. She really shouldn’t leave Harper alone, but she also can’t bring herself to turn back. 

She’s sure that her feet are leading her toward her own tent, but when she looks up, she’s in front of Bellamy’s. With only slight hesitation, she goes in. 

Bellamy’s laying shirtless with his arm over his eyes. Clarke considers turning back around, but he moves his arm and looks at her. She feels his concern so completely that tears begin to form in her eyes. 

“I’m not okay,” she whispers unevenly. 

Bellamy moves over on the makeshift bed and gestures for her to lay down. Once she does, he kisses her softly and strokes her cheek.

“I know.” 

Clarke pulls him back to her, enjoying the blankness that comes to her mind as her lips move against his and her leg hitches over his hip. 

“Distract me.” 

 

Clarke is awakened by a patch of sun hitting her face. She squints against it, momentarily disoriented. It all comes back in pieces. The kiss. The death. The desperate need to forget. She looks at her hand, which is splayed over Bellamy’s chest, and snatches it away as if he’s burned her. What has she done? What does this mean? 

Clarke quickly dresses and sneaks out of the tent before Bellamy has a chance to wake. She looks around. Not many people are awake yet, but she spots Octavia by the fire looking bored. Clarke attempts to move quietly to the side and away from view, but Octavia looks up before she has the chance. Upon seeing Clarke Griffin sneaking out of her brother’s tent, her face twists with incredulousness. 

“Clarke?” she asks, pushing herself to standing. 

Clarke sighs. The jig is up. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Octavia hisses as she approaches. 

“Nothing,” Clarke says quickly, moving toward the infirmary. Octavia follows. “It was nothing.”

Octavia’s eyebrows shoot up. “My brother is nothing?”

“You know that’s not what I mean.” 

“Looks like Monty is going to owe Jasper his rations,” Octavia says regrettably after taking a moment to quietly assess Clarke’s intentions. 

Clarke’s gaze snaps to the other girl. “No one is going to know about this.”

Octavia rolls her eyes. “Everyone is going to know about this.”

“Not if you don’t tell them.” 

Octavia smiles. “You know as well as I do that nothing stays a secret around here for long.” 

Clarke spins to face Octavia before she enters the drop ship. “Please, just let me figure this out.” 

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Octavia sighs. “But if it was obvious before, it’s going to be even more so now.”

Clarke doesn’t respond and instead goes into the infirmary to relieve the volunteers and check on the injured. They all appear to be stable, some conscious and some not. She brings the ones who are awake water and checks their wounds while Octavia glares at her with crossed arms. 

A sharp pain moves through Clarke’s right shoulder. She drops the water she’s holding in shock. What the hell? Octavia looks out the drop ship entrance and then back at Clarke curiously. 

“What?” snaps Clarke, pressing her hand to her shoulder as the pain dies away. 

She smirks. “Oh, this is interesting,” is all she says, before disappearing out of the drop ship. 

The rest of the day goes by achingly slow. Clarke avoids Bellamy, Bellamy avoids Clarke. She thinks it’s because neither of them know what last night meant, and it’s too much to have to confront it now. At least, that’s why she keeps herself tethered to the infirmary while he sticks to supervising the work going on outside. Antsy restlessness plays at the back of her mind while her shoulder aches from time to time. She feels strange, like she’s not alone in her own mind. She tries to shake it off, but the feeling persists. 

It’s nearly sunset when anger pushes its way into Clarke’s consciousness, causing her fingers to shake and her blood to pump faster through her veins. She looks around confusedly, not understanding what’s happening to her. She’d been sitting in the infirmary watching over her injured people for hours. She was essentially doing nothing. 

That’s when she hears a commotion outside. She gets up to investigate and finds a large group circled around Bellamy and Murphy. Clarke pushes to the front, but is held back by Finn who shakes his head at her. She looks over at Raven who looks equally alarmed. Octavia stands behind Bellamy with her arms crossed, looking annoyed. 

“If you’re going to threaten my sister,” Bellamy rages, getting in Murphy’s face. “You’re going to have to deal with me.” 

“Oh, come off your high horse,” Murphy says with an eye roll and pushes Bellamy back harshly. “She’s a big girl, she can handle herself.” 

“You’ve caused nothing but problems since we’ve been here, Murphy. Maybe it’s time for you to go.” 

“Maybe it’s time for you to tell your sister to stop whoring herself out to our enemies,” Murphy retaliates.

Clarke feels pain explode through her shoulder as Bellamy halfway raises his arm in preparation to strike, and then lets it fall with a wince. She again catches Octavia’s interested gaze, but quickly looks away, knowing exactly what the other girl is thinking. 

“One more word, Murphy, and you’re dead,” Bellamy growls, turning to walk away. 

Murphy grabs Bellamy’s shoulder and pulls him back. Murphy’s fist collides with Bellamy’s face in a crushing blow. Clarke lets out a short yelp as pain explodes across the left side of her face, causing her to fall to her knees in surprise, her hand held to her face. 

She looks up to find everyone staring at her.

No, no, no. This is not happening. 

 

“It’s ridiculous,” Clarke snaps, pacing back and forth in the top hatch of the drop ship. Octavia, Raven, and Wells sit with their backs to the drop ship wall. They’d found her cowering up there nearly a half an hour ago, and since then it’s been nothing but circular arguments. “It’s a myth. A fantasy.”

Octavia raises an eyebrow. “Obviously not.” 

“You felt the hit, didn’t you?” asked Wells, his hand circling around Raven’s. “Isn’t that the telltale sign? Feeling each other’s pain?” 

“According to every version of the story I’ve ever heard,” says Raven. “I’m just surprised it’s him. You two barely just stopped hating each other’s guts. 

“Soul mates tend to happen that way,” Octavia sighs.

“No, they don’t tend to anything,” Clarke says, throwing her hands into the air. “They don’t exist.”

“Well, I’ve never met anyone who’s had it happen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t,” offers Wells. “The stories go back thousands of years.” 

“That doesn’t mean they’re true,” Clarke insists, despite the fact that her aching orbit is basically proof. There really is no other explanation. 

‘Then what’s going on here?” Raven asks as Clarke rubs at her sore face. “What more evidence do you need?” 

Clarke doesn’t answer. It’s not about evidence. It’s not even about myth versus reality. It’s about the fear that’s sitting deep in her stomach. The uncertainty that’s keeping her from accepting what might otherwise be a blessing. Last night, when she went to him, she’d wanted a distraction not a soul mate. In a world like this, a soul mate is a curse. It’s like begging for tragedy. 

“Fine, say it is true,” Clarke gives in. “How do I break it?” 

Octavia blinks. “What the hell do you mean ‘how do I break it’?” 

“Octavia, do you really think this can do any good?”

“Clarke, you are not just going to abandon my brother. Have you ever read the stories of people breaking the connection?” Clarke shakes her head. “It isn’t pretty. For either of you.” 

“It’ll be okay,” Wells says, offering a reassuring smile. 

Clarke looks down. “He already has enough pain as it is. I don’t want him to feel mine, too.”

None of them have anything to say to that.

 

Clarke finds Bellamy sitting alone by the fire. He’s got a nice shiner forming where Murphy hit him. Clarke touches her own eye. The pain has dulled, but not disappeared. He doesn’t react when she sits next to him and follows his eye line into the fire. It dances and licks its way over the wood, destroying everything it touches. Clarke can relate. 

“You’re scared,” he says finally, still not looking at her. 

“So are you,” she says softly. 

She can feel everything he’s feeling, but in a different way. It’s like a shadow of her own emotion. It had become easy to distinguish once she’d started paying attention. It’s the same with the pain. It doesn’t hurt any more or less than if it had happened to her, but the sensation is different. She can’t explain it even to herself. 

He breathes a vague laugh. “I’m not sure I’m going to like this.”

“Like I couldn’t already read you like an open book,” Clarke counters, running her hand over his back. 

“Who would have thought, hmm?” he murmurs. “You and me?” 

“I didn’t believe it,” Clarke tells him honestly. “Octavia, Raven, and Wells had to convince me.” 

Bellamy smiles as Clarke runs her fingers through the curls at the base of his neck. “Jasper wouldn’t shut up about it. Octavia, either.” 

“Jasper’s just happy to have something to gossip about. It’s gotten a little dry around here,” Clarke jokes.

“Octavia jumps at any opportunity to see me happy,” Bellamy adds, putting his arm around Clarke and holding her closer to him. She relaxes into his grasp, her head falling onto his shoulder.

“Are you?” she asks carefully.

He laughs at that. “I’ve forgotten what it feels like,” he tells her. Clarke nods against his shoulder. She knows the feeling. “But I think I got pretty close last night.”

Clarke separates from him, and forces him to look at her. “I think we should break it.” 

Bellamy blinks at her. “Clarke-.” 

“I don’t want to hurt you. I mean, look at you.” Her fingertips ghost over the bruise on his eye. “You have enough pain of your own. If something happened to me -.” 

He shakes his head. “I’ll heal, Clarke. And nothing’s going to happen to you. Or to me. We’ll keep each other safe.”

He leans in then to kiss her, his thumb tracing a pattern over her cheek. “We’ll be okay.” 

 

And they were. 

For about a month.

Clarke instantly knows something’s wrong. Over time, her connection to Bellamy had strengthened. She can feel where he is, whether he is near or far. She can feel his heart beating as if it is her own. She can define his emotions nearly as well as she can define her own. It’s as if he is an extension of herself in every way. 

Right now, she feels nothing. 

His emotions stop running through the back of her head, but she doesn’t feel the pain she knows would course through every cell of her body if he’d died. He’s merely unconscious. But why would he be unconscious on a hunting trip?

“Something’s wrong,” Clarke tells Finn who is looking at an animal track left in the mud. He looks up at her with raised eyebrows. “It’s Bellamy. We have to get back to the group.” 

When they finally reach the rest of their hunting party, they discover half of them unconscious. Wells sits with a disoriented Raven while looking a bit unsteady himself. Clarke scans the area. As she suspected, Bellamy isn’t there. Panic shoots through her. 

“Are you guys okay?” Finn asks as he checks on Dax and Monroe. 

‘Where’s Bellamy?” Clarke demands. “What happened?” 

Wells shakes his head. “They shot us all with these.” He shows her a thin, sharpened piece of wood. “It must have been covered in some kind of sleeping agent. When we came to, he was gone.” 

A couple hours later, Clarke is leading the search party. Every step she takes feels like it’s in the wrong direction. She can feel that he’s far from her, but she can’t tell how far or which way. Not until he wakes up. 

When he does, Clarke is overwhelmed by both emotion and pain. Her wrists feel like they’re being burned, her abdomen like someone’s kicked it repeatedly. She’s filled with hatred and fear and a will to fight. 

Now she knows which direction he is. She begins to run, feeling him more strongly with every step. By now she’s out of range of her group. She can’t even hear them calling for her anymore. Everything but the path before her is a blur. Nothing matters except for – 

She feels a stick in the back of her neck, and everything goes black.

 

When she wakes, she wakes across from Bellamy who is tied by his wrists to the low ceiling, same as her. They both have gags in their mouths to keep them from speaking and rope around their ankles to keep them from kicking out. Clarke pulls as hard as she can against the ropes holding her wrists, feeling them burn her skin as she does so. She stops when she sees Bellamy wince. Oh, God. 

“I didn’t think it was true,” says a voice from the shadows. “My spies could hardly believe it themselves.” 

Clarke turns her head to look toward the source of the voice. Three figures emerge. Anya, another woman, and a man. Clarke recoils involuntarily. She knows these people will do her and Bellamy harm. There’s no way around it. They are completely at the mercy of the grounders now. 

“We were coming for you anyway, Clarke,” says the woman Clarke doesn’t recognize. “But then we heard of this, and we had to know if it was true. The plan worked out nicely.”

Clarke glares as the man comes close to her and removes the gag from her mouth. “Let him go,” she immediately demands. “You want the leader of the Sky People? You have her.” 

The woman shakes her head, her fingers trailing over an iron rod sitting in a stove against a wall. She pulls it out and examines the reddened metal carefully. Without warning, she whips it to the side, letting it collide with the bare flesh of Bellamy’s abdomen and holds it there. Clarke feels the iron burning through his skin, destroying layer by layer. She cries out as Bellamy yells against his gag. 

“Stop,” Clarke cries. “Don’t do this.” 

The woman smiles vaguely. “So, it is true,” she says. “I figured it might be since we found you heading in the right direction despite there being nothing to lead you that way, but now we have proof.” 

“What do you want?” Clarke demands. “I’ll give it to you, just don’t kill him.”

“So rare,” the woman begins as if Clarke hadn’t spoken at all. “Soul mates, I mean. Legend says they have the greatest power of all, and whoever kills them, possesses it.” 

“You don’t honestly believe that,” Clarke snaps.

The woman looks at her with hard eyes. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Don’t question me.” 

“Crazy bitch,” Clarke spits when the woman gets close to Bellamy. 

“Shut up, Clarke,” Anya orders, and then turns to the woman. “Don’t play with them, Lexa. Kill them and it’ll all be over. They Sky People will not survive without their leaders, and you will have their power.” 

The woman called Lexa seems to consider this for a moment. “I’m not going to kill both of them, but they both deserve to suffer for those they’ve killed,” she states, pulling the gag from Bellamy’s mouth. “Blood must have blood.” 

“Bitch,” he snarls, fighting against his bonds. “You attacked us first.” 

“You invaded our land,” she counters, pulling a blade from her belt and holding it against his throat. Clarke jolts forward instinctively even though she knows she’s trapped. “That’s an attack.” 

“We didn’t have a choice,” cries Clarke. “You don’t understand.”

Lexa whirls on Clarke. “There is always a choice,” she snaps, this time pressing her blade to Clarke’s throat. The edge cuts shallowly into Clarke’s skin, causing her blood to pool around it. She can hear Bellamy yelling something but his words don’t register. 

“I know what it feels like,” Lexa says, turning her body so she can look back and forth between Bellamy and Clarke. “I had my soul mate ripped from me. You can’t even imagine the pain, but you’ll find out soon.”

Lexa presses the blade harder against Clarke’s skin, and Clarke knows what she has to do. 

“Clarke, don’t,” Bellamy says. He must be able to feel her attempts at breaking the connection. It’s much harder than she thought it would be, and every time she mentally attacks it, she can feel her heart breaking a little more. 

“I have to,” she cries. “I can’t let you -.” 

Clarke’s it cut off by searing pain through her spine and stomach. For a second, she thinks it’s Bellamy, but then she looks down and sees a sword protruding through her own stomach. No. She can’t leave him like this. 

“Clarke!” Bellamy exclaims, pain etched over his expression. 

Clarke coughs, and blood leaks from her mouth. She tries again to break the connection, but fails. She’s not strong enough. 

“Gustus,” Lexa scolds. “I wasn’t done with them.” 

“I was,” he grunts, removing the sword from Clarke. He then cuts the rope that holds Clarke upright, sending her helplessly to the ground. 

Lexa looks down at her coldly. “Blood must have blood.” She then looks at Bellamy. “Move your people out of our territory in three day’s time, or we will have no choice but to finish this once and for all.” 

Gustus cuts Bellamy loose and then backs up and prepares to defend himself, but Bellamy just scrambles toward Clarke. He lifts her head onto his lap and brushes her bloodied hair out of her face. 

“You’ll be okay,” he says, pressing his palm against the wound on her stomach. 

Clarke coughs. “Break it,” she whispers. “It’ll hurt less.” 

Bellamy shakes his head. “You aren’t going to die.” 

“Bellamy, please.” 

“No,” he snaps harshly. “I won’t give up like this.” 

He waits until he’s sure Lexa, Anya, and Gustus are gone, and then hoists Clarke into his arms. Her body is limp in his grasp, her head lolls from side to side. The pallor of her skin makes him nervous. He has to get her back although he’s not sure who else can fix this but her. But he has to try. 

As they move through the woods, Clarke weakly raises her hand, her fingers tracing Bellamy’s jaw softly. She doesn’t want this for him. She knows that her death will scar him forever, that it will feel like everything in him is breaking. He’s too stubborn to let her go – he thinks she’ll make it, but she can feel herself fading. Black spots come in and out of her vision as the blood drains from her body.

She always knew this would end in tragedy. 

“Stop,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “Put me down.” 

Bellamy hesitates, but ultimately grants her wishes. His hand is shaking as he cups her face. 

“Let me help you,” he nearly begs. 

Clarke shakes her head weakly. “You can’t, but it’s okay.” She swallows. “I’m – sorry. If I hadn’t -.” 

Bellamy shakes his head. “I said I’d protect you. This isn’t your fault.” 

Clarke is quiet for a moment, her eyes searching his until the blackness comes. She breathes out the only “I love you” she’s ever told him, and then it’s over. 

Every nerve in his body fires at once as her declaration of love leaves her lips. He holds her lifeless body to him as he screams out in the worst pain he could ever imagine. It’s as if his heart and every bone in his body is breaking at the same time. 

The stories always said that a soul mate’s death is infinitely worse than one’s own. He hadn’t believed it until now.

**Author's Note:**

> If ya'll can't tell, I kind of gave up by the end. I didn't want it to be super long so that's why it might feel a little choppy. I dunno, I hope you guys enjoyed it anyway (or at least cried a little).


End file.
